Tuesday

Feb 21, 2017 at 5:50 PM

Nelson Mandela had been in prison some 20 years when his grandson Ndaba Mandela was born. Ndaba met him for the first time when he was 7 or 8, and at age 11, a few years after Mandela’s release, he moved in with him to live.

His grandfather was tough on him, pushing him to achieve, Ndaba Mandela said in an interview Tuesday at the University of North Florida.

"As a young boy, it was just discipline," he said. "Our relationship was just around education, around school, about how I performed at school."

But he also recalls his late grandfather’s sense of humor, and his love of children.

Nelson Mandela — an anti-apartheid icon who went on to become South Africa’s president and the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize — often said that what he really missed, during 27 years in jail, was the sound of children. So after his release in 1990, he doted on children.

"If there was a child in the room, even if there was a president there, it didn’t matter who was in the room: His focus was only on the child," Ndaba Mandela said.

He came to UNF to speak at the university’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Scholarship Luncheon. He’s 34, and lives in Johannesburg. His late father, Makgatho, was one of four children Mandela had with his first wife, Evelyn Mase.

His message to students?

"They are the masters of their own destiny," he said. "The only enemy that they face in the world is themselves. They have a Nelson Mandela that lives inside of them. They need to be courageous and strong and fight the injustices they face, on their campus and in their home, and not be afraid to fight."

Oupa Seane, director of UNF’s Intercultural Center for Peace, is South African, and as a teen he spent a year in prison after being arrested during an anti-apartheid march. He knew Ndaba Mandela’s aunt, and over the years met Nelson Mandela three times, once for lunch. At that lunch, he asked Mandela to visit UNF, and the former president agreed.

"The president is somebody who kept his word, so I knew he was going to come and do it," Seane said. But soon his health deteriorated, and he wasn’t able to come.

"He passed without having fulfilled his promise to come to UNF, so Ndaba is sort of fulfilling his grandfather’s promise," Seane said.

He admitted it was a little eerie picking up Mandela at the airport.

"I told him, not only is he a Mandela, but he looks like the president, he sounds like him, he has the same accent and he thinks like him." He chuckled. "It was very, very strange."

Mandela is co-founder of the nonprofit Africa Rising Foundation, which he says is designed to encourage African youth to be the leaders and beneficiaries of change in the continent. It also wants to offer a more nuanced view of Africa.

"The world does not understand Africa," he said. "We need to take back the narrative that exists on Africa because the narrative that exists is not owned by the African people, but by BBC and CNN and Sky. That is not a representation of us."

To be sure, he said, there are many challenges that remain. Here’s just one: Technology and social media have become more prevalent in South Africa, yet still some students finish high school without touching a computer.

"How are we to compete with kids in Japan who start learning about technology at 3 years old?" Mandela said.

Another campaign he’s undertaken is trying to continue to erase the stigma of HIV and AIDS. Both his parents died of AIDS and knew for years that they had it. But Ndaba Mandela didn’t learn about that until shortly before his father, Makgatho, died. It just wasn’t talked about.

Nelson Mandela learned about his son’s diagnosis at about the same time. A few years earlier, Mandela had become a campaigner against the epidemic, which hit South Africa hard, and after his son passed away he quickly and publicly announced the cause of Makgatho’s death — another step in his effort to confront its stigma.

"That secret," Ndaba Mandela said, "is what killed our parents quicker than what they should have. That is my belief. That is how it eats our people away because they don’t have the support system — they have to die in silence."

Matt Soergel: (904) 359-4082

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